I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

You never loved me, nobody never loved me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted somebody to be kind to me - I wanted-" She wanted tenderness. So did I; but not from her. She was no part of high fantasy and worship and hopeless jealousy. She was the accessible thing.

You wouldn't care if I was dead. Nobody'd care. That's all you want, just my damned body, not me. Nobody wants me, just my damned body. And I'm damned and you're damned with your cock and your cleverness and your chemistry-

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.